Kongo (battleship)

The Kongo was an Imperial Japanese Navy battleship that laid down in 1911 and commissioned in 1913. Named for Mount Kongo in southern central Honshu, the cruiser Kongo was built by the Vickers Shipbuilding Company at Barrow-in-Furness, England, the last Japanese capital ship to be built outside of Japan. The ship patrolled off the China coast during World War I, and she was rebuilt as a battleship in 1929, becoming a "fast battleship" in 1935. During World War II, she covered the invasion of Malaya and the invasion of Indonesia, and she fought against the US Navy at the Battle of Midway and during the Solomon Islands campaign. She later fought at the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the Battle of Leyte Gulf, sinking American ships at the latter battle. On 21 November 1944, she was torpedoed by a US Navy submarine in the Formosa Strait, the only Japanese battleship sunk by submarine and the last battleship sunk by submarine in history (as of 2017).